In September 2009, Timothy Ryan, Asia/Europe Director of the Solidarity Center, traveled to Afghanistan and spoke with 31-year-old Farida Nekzad, managing editor and deputy director of Pajhwok Afghan News and vice president of the South Asia Media Commission. A champion of press freedom and women’s rights in Afghanistan, Nekzad works under tremendous pressure at a time when women journalists are being threatened and killed for their reporting. Despite the danger, Nekzad is committed to staying in her country and continuing her work.

	Farida Nekzad is a champion of press freedom and worker rights in Afghanistan. Photo by Leslie Knott

“What drives you to this dream?” That was the question I asked Farida Nekzad, a courageous woman pursuing her journalism career in an increasingly dangerous Afghanistan. I met Farida in Kabul, where the Solidarity Center was conducting a program with print, TV, and radio journalists and their unions. We were trying to pull together disparate media outlets and worker organizations for a common purpose: to establish press clubs in Afghanistan.

The media mirrors the geographic, ethnic, and political fragmentation of Afghanistan society and politics. Over the past few years, the Solidarity Center had worked with Afghan union partners and the International Federation of Journalists—which represents 600,000 members worldwide—to find ways to help build a national labor organization. Like most endeavors in Afghanistan, however, this proved daunting. We decided instead to establish press clubs in Kabul, Herat, Mazar-I-Sherif, and other cities that could help bring together the various media sectors from so many different regions and ethnic loyalties.

Everyone in this hall on the campus of Kabul University had brave and unusual stories to tell, but Farida—one of only three women among the 35 participants—stood out strongly. A longtime journalist, Farida had founded three radio stations for women in districts outside Kabul. This year she started her own news organization, Wakht News Agency. She fled the country during the Taliban period of the 1990s but returned in 2002, determined to promote the rights of women. “I wanted to show and give chances for women to advance in journalism,” she told me. “Women with more experience than some men can’t get a promotion to being editors; men get the promotions.”

In a calm, soft, but insistent voice, her strong and handsome face framed by her headscarf, she talked about the dangers she faces, both as a woman and as a journalist: “I have been threatened in the last year. In January there was a bomb explosion in front of my apartment building. Two weeks later there was an explosion in the back. In February they threatened to shoot me. They threatened to throw acid in my face. I was pregnant, and so I stayed at home.”

In 2008, Farida won the Committee to Protect Journalists International Press Freedom Award for her courageous work in Afghanistan. While she was in New York to accept the award, one of the other honorees urged her to stay in the United States and seek asylum, but she refused, saying, “I don’t want to stay, I have to complete the dream.”

A few months ago, that dream almost came to an abrupt, violent end. Farida knew extremist enemies had been staking out her house, watching her movements. “Sometimes I would go to the office at four in the morning; sometimes at six,” she said. Sometimes she would spend the night at her sister’s house.

But one night, traveling home with a colleague from Wakht, she had noticed the same people hanging out on the street in front of her office, casing her car. When the car pulled up to an intersection, one of the assailants, mistaking a staffer in the backseat for Farida, opened the door and tried to grab her. Their car sped off, the staffer was spared, and a kidnap attempt was averted.

Her quiet, earnest manner masks the tension and the threat that lies just beneath the surface of Farida’s life and commitment. “This is my dream,” she says. “Every woman should be able to come to the discussion – to discuss and get her rights.”